“Senator, that would not be wise.” The press aide was in a panic now. “I can’t let you do this.” But his agitation only seemed to reinforce Abelard’s calm.

“Please leave now, Art,” he repeated. “If it will reassure you, I will ask Mr. Truell to treat our conversation as ‘off the record.’ Will you do that, Mr. Truell?”

“Yes,” I said. I probably shouldn’t have agreed to his request, technically speaking, but the tape recorder was still running, so I would at least have a record.

Snell retreated, closing the door behind him. Abelard looked me in the eye. It was a silent appeal.

“Mr. Truell,” he said. “I would like to talk with you as a human being. Is that possible?”

I paused to consider his question, and then slowly shook my head. “I have to be honest, Senator. I’m here as a journalist.”

“I see.” A bit of the brightness seemed to come back into his eyes as he spoke. “Then I will pretend that you are a human being, and take my chances. What happened to me fourteen years ago—when I was, as you say, hospitalized for severe depression—is a moment for which I am everlastingly grateful. Please don’t think I am ashamed of it. I truly believe that it saved my life.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I can understand that.” But they were just words. My chief function that day was to turn on the tape recorder.

“For many years before that, I had been in the power of a dark force I could not control. I had suppressed it long enough to win election to the Senate in 1980, but it returned the next year, powerfully and overwhelmingly. It was an emptiness that left no room for any of the pleasures of my life. Nothing had meaning for me. My wife, my children, my friends. Even the foods I loved had no flavor. But I was a public man, to the world’s eyes a triumphant man. And I could not tell anyone what I was feeling. In that sense I was truly helpless. I felt that to share this secret and seek treatment would destroy my career and my family. And I began to believe, Mr. Truell, that my only possible escape would be to take my own life. It sickens me now to think that I was ever so desperate, but that was the case in the spring of 1982.

“One day that spring I read a magazine article by a writer who had experienced this same sort of severe depression. It was a revelation. What more can I say than that? He was describing what I had been living. He wrote that with hospitalization and drug therapy, he was now recovering from his illness. And on that day I began to think it possible that I might survive.”